The 28 Year War You've Never Heard Of

In a post this morning, Glenn Reynolds repeated a talking point that I've been hearing a lot lately from neoconservatives:

He [Paul Campos] hurts his credibility up front by saying that Iran is not at war with us -- when, in fact, it has been since 1979, with the deaths of many Americans, soldiers and otherwise, on its hands.

Have we really been "at war" with Iran since 1979? If so, there are a few events that historians may need to revisit.

First, and most obviously, if we've been at war with Iran since 1979, then President Reagan, then-Vice President Bush, and the rest of the Reagan administration are necessarily guilty of high treason. During the Iran-Contra affair, they illegally sold arms to Iran (via Israel), including thousands of BGM-71 TOW (Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided) anti-tank missiles. Iran subsequently reverse-engineered these missiles and now produces its own version, called the Toophan, which Hezbollah reportedly used against Israeli tanks in the recent conflict in Lebanon. If we were "at war" with Iran at the time of these arms sales, is there any non-treasonous interpretation of this conduct? I don't think so.

And beyond the obvious Iran-Contra implications, the suggestion that we've been at war with Iran since 1979 also overlooks an important period in U.S.-Iranian relations just after 9/11. As Newsweek recently reported:

After September 11 in particular, relations grew warmer than at any time since the fall of the shah. America wanted Iran's help in Afghanistan, and Iran gave it, partly out of fear of an angry superpower and partly in order to be rid of its troublesome Taliban neighbors. . . .

For Iran's reformists, 9/11 was a blessing in disguise. Previous attempts to reach out to America had been stymied by conservative mullahs. But the fear that an enraged superpower would blindly lash out focused minds in Tehran. Mohammad Hossein Adeli was one of only two deputies on duty at the Foreign Ministry when the attacks took place, late on a sweltering summer afternoon. He immediately began contacting top officials, insisting that Iran respond quickly. "We wanted to truly condemn the attacks but we also wished to offer an olive branch to the United States, showing we were interested in peace," says Adeli. To his relief, Iran's top official, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, quickly agreed. . .

The fear dissipated after Sept. 20, when the FBI announced that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. But there was new reason for cooperation: for years Tehran had been backing the Afghan guerrillas fighting the Taliban, Osama bin Laden's hosts. Suddenly, having U.S. troops next door in Afghanistan didn't seem like a bad idea. American and Iranian officials met repeatedly in Geneva in the days before the Oct. 7 U.S. invasion. The Iranians were more than supportive. "In fact, they were impatient," says a U.S. official involved in the talks, who asked not to be named speaking about topics that remain sensitive. "They'd ask, 'When's the military action going to start? Let's get going!' "

Opinions differ wildly over how much help the Iranians actually were on the ground. But what is beyond doubt is how critical they were to stabilizing the country after the fall of Kabul. In late November 2001, the leaders of Afghanistan's triumphant anti-Taliban factions flew to Bonn, Germany, to map out an interim Afghan government with the help of representatives from 18 Coalition countries. . . .

The Iranian team's leader, Javad Zarif, was a good-humored University of Denver alumnus with a deep, measured voice, who would later become U.N. ambassador. Jim Dobbins, Bush's first envoy to the Afghans, recalls sharing coffee with Zarif in one of the sitting rooms, poring over a draft of the agreement laying out the new Afghan government. "Zarif asked me, 'Have you looked at it?' I said, 'Yes, I read it over once'," Dobbins recalls. "Then he said, with a certain twinkle in his eye: 'I don't think there's anything in it that mentions democracy. Don't you think there could be some commitment to democratization?' This was before the Bush administration had discovered democracy as a panacea for the Middle East. I said that's a good idea."

Toward the end of the Bonn talks, Dobbins says, "we reached a pivotal moment." The various parties had decided that the suave, American-backed Hamid Karzai would lead the new Afghan government. But he was a Pashtun tribal leader from the south, and rivals from the north had actually won the capital. In the brutal world of Afghan power politics, that was a recipe for conflict. At 2 a.m. on the night before the deal was meant to be signed, the Northern Alliance delegate Yunus Qanooni was stubbornly demanding 18 out of 24 new ministries. Frantic negotiators gathered in the suite of United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. A sleepy Zarif translated for Qanooni. Finally, at close to 4 a.m., he leaned over to whisper in the Afghan's ear: " 'This is the best deal you're going to get'." Qanooni said, " 'OK'."

That moment, Dobbins says now, was critical. "The Russians and the Indians had been making similar points," he says. "But it wasn't until Zarif took him aside that it was settled ... We might have had a situation like we had in Iraq, where we were never able to settle on a single leader and government." A month later Tehran backed up the political support with financial muscle: at a donor's conference in Tokyo, Iran pledged $500 million (at the time, more than double the Americans') to help rebuild Afghanistan.

Of course, this flurry of cooperation was soon undercut by the White House's decision to label Iran as a member of the "axis of evil." But that doesn't change the fact that during this time period, the U.S. and Iran were not, by any possible definition, warring nations.

People like Glenn Reynolds should not be able to get away with this sort of blatant historical revisionism. It's absurd, it's hypocritical, and it's an insult to everyone's intelligence.

UPDATE: See also this post by Blue Texan, who takes Jeff Goldstein to task for making a similar claim last week. I should also point out the additional irony that Michael Ledeen (whose opinion Goldstein cites in his post) was actually an important player in the Iran-Contra affair.

UPDATE II: Scott Lemieux makes the same point. And apparently Nitpicker beat us all to the punch, having made this point over 3 years ago.